My mother grew up poor in the housing projects of Brownsville, Brooklyn. Despite her occasional Tina Turner accent from incessant British Broadcasting Channel (BBC) watching, she was hardly refined growing up. She raised three boys into strong men amidst difficult circumstances and a challenging environment. We have all progressed from her lessons of education and hard work. She was a disciplinarian cause she had to be and partly cause I think she just liked whipping ass. Either way she had to be tough to counter the lessons we learned outside of her grasp and within New York City’s streets.
While she could not control what we saw and did outside of the house, she tried to impart many lessons of betterment that she hoped would stick. One of those imparted lessons was making sure her boys had manners.
It started first at home. Please and thank you were minimal conditioned responses to requests. We lived in a building with a lot of elderly people, and she always insisted we hold doors open and help them with their groceries or packages. We were often parceled out to change light bulbs or simple household repairs, for people who even if able, just liked having the company.
Back in the day of land line house phones, if she overheard any of us calling someone’s house and our opening line did not include; “Hello, may I speak to…” a smack resulted followed up with her screaming that we were raised better than that. The receiving end of phone calls had her putting all of our little friends on blast if they did not exhibit proper etiquette or manners in calling her house. We did not get many calls, cause cats knew not to play on my mom’s phone. If we ever expected a call we raced to the phone to spare the level 10 embarrassment she took pride in dispensing.
To this day, if I am ever calling a number that I am unfamiliar with or know it not to be someone’s personal cell number, every call still begins with, “hello, may I speak to….” The manners she taught are ingrained in who I am. I hold doors for people. I still say please and thank you 98% of the time (still working on that 2%).
Manners cost nothing. Yet the simplest of gestures often mean so much. Which of us can tolerate rudeness. Yet, tolerate we must, because so many MF’ers are just so damn unnecessarily rude. I don’t know if it is a lack of home training, but rudeness and lack of manners are a societal epidemic.
Did I mention that manners are FREE! It takes so little effort to be polite… to show appreciation… to be considerate to others. The impact of those actions will undoubtedly lead to other positive reactions and interactions. If it doesn’t that is okay. What is important that, is that we all lead by example in displaying manners. Think about it… it is a learned behavior. Teach don’t preach. Lead by example for others do not have or understand manners. We are all better off for such lessons.
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#manners, #rudeness, #teachnotpreach, #kindness, #consideration, #appreciation
